determined on by the Coalition are in full work.  It is your heroic resistance that has made this possible.  It was the indispensable condition, and it will be the foundation, of our coming victories.”  “Germany”—­says M. Reinach—­“during ten months had used her best soldiers in furious assaults on Verdun....  These troops, among the finest in the world, had in five of these months gained a few kilometres of ground on the road to the fortress.  This ground, watered with blood as no field of carnage had ever been, which saw close upon 700,000 men fall, was lost in two actions (October 24th—­November 3rd and December 15th—­18th), and Germany was brought back to within a few furlongs of her starting point....  Douaumont and Louvemont were certainly neither Rocroy nor Austerlitz; but Verdun, from the first day to the last, from the rush stemmed by Castelnau to the battles won by Nivelle and Mangin; Verdun, with her mud-stained poilu, standing firm in the tempest, who said:  “They shall not pass!” (passeront pas!), and they have not passed; Verdun, for the Germans a charnel-house, for us a sanctuary, was something greater by far.”

With these thoughts in mind we dropped down the long hill to Verdun again, and so across the bridge and on to that famous road, the Voie Sacree, up which Petain, “the road-mender” (Le Cantonnier), brought all his supplies—­men, food, guns, ammunition—­from Bar-le-Duc by motor-lorry, passing and repassing each other in a perpetual succession—­one every twenty seconds.  The road was endlessly broken up, sometimes by the traffic, sometimes by shell, and as endlessly repaired by troops specially assigned to the task.  And presently we are passing the Moulin des Regrets, where Castelnau and Petain met on the night of the 25th, and the resolution was taken to counter-attack instead of withdrawing.  Verdun, indeed, is the classic illustration of the maxim that attack is the best defence, or, as the British Commander-in-Chief puts it in his latest dispatch, that “defensive success in battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive.”  The long battle on the Meuse, “the greatest single action in history,” was in one aspect a vast school, in which a score of matters belonging to the art of war were tested, illustrated, and explained, with the same general result as appears throughout the struggle, a result insisted on by each great commander, British or French, in turn; i.e., that in the principles of war there is nothing new to be learnt.  Discipline, training, co-operation, attack; these are the unchanging forces the great general has at command.  It depends on his own genius what he makes of them.

Verdun fades behind us, and we are on our way to the Marne.  In the strange isolation of the car, passing so quickly, as the short winter twilight comes on, through country one has never seen before and will perhaps never see again, the war becomes a living pageant on the background of the dark.  Then, with the lights of Chateau-Thierry, thought jumps in a moment from the oldest army in the war to the youngest.  This old town, these dim banks of the Marne, have a long history.  But in the history of last year, and the closing scenes of the Great War, they belong specially to America.  This is American ground.